About
Maria Kleinschmidt is a designer and lecturer who teaches design students across drawing, color, and fashion illustration.
Her practice and her pedagogy are closely linked: teaching prompts her to investigate particular ideas, topics and materials, and what she discovers in her studio consistently feeds back into the classroom. This reciprocal process—one practice informing the other—gives her work a both methodical and exploratory quality.
She is especially drawn to color, analogue drawing techniques, figurative drawing and collage, and wall-based work. Her approach emphasizes material thinking, craft and perception: the physicality of media and surfaces, and the interplay of hue, texture and form.
She is a member of Deutsches Farbenzentrum—the German branch of the International Colour Association.
Education
2021 – 2025 → MA Design, Fachhochschule Potsdam
2010 – 2015 → BA Art and Visual History / Philosophy, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
2001 – 2007 → Diploma (FH) Communication Design, Fachhochschule Potsdam
Teaching Experience
- Fachhochschule Potsdam → color and drawing classes (2020 – present), 12 SWS
- Hochschule Anhalt, Dessau → artistic basics classes (2018 – 2019), 12 SWS
- Fachhochschule Potsdam → color and drawing classes (2015 – 2017), 14 SWS
- HTW Berlin → fashion drawing classes (2010 – 2011), 5 SWS
- Universität der Künste Berlin → fashion drawing classes (2008 – 2013), 4 SWS
Artworks
Books published as an illustrator
- Grand Paris (2017), written by Stefanie von Wietersheim
- Tante Karos Gefühl für Stil (2013), written by Beate Berger
Capabilities
- Portrait Commissions
- Illustration
- Graphic Design
- Layouting
- Mural Art
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